A shortish roundup this week, but all kinds of good reads:
- Same-sex parents who have biological or stepchildren tend to be economically disadvantaged compared to their opposite-sex counterparts, whereas same-sex parents who have adopted tend to be economically advantaged, says demographer Gary Gates of UCLA’s Williams Institute. Despite the common media view of same-sex parents as relatively wealthy (see Modern Family, The L Word, The Kids Are All Right, etc.), Gates says, “a complete picture of LGBT parents in the U.S. would show a community with substantial socioeconomic and racial/ethnic diversity.”
- William Lucas Walker at HuffPo has started a series of “Spilled Milk” parenting columns: the first is about his children’s reaction to the Prop 8 controversy in California, and the second about coming out, being accepted by his mother, and having his daughter.
- Washington Post writer Janice D’Arcy offers her take on what photos from previous WaPo articles say about gay and lesbian parents.
- The Massachusetts Appeals Court ruled that same-sex married couples have the same parental rights as opposite-sex married couples when it comes to children born to them by assisted insemination.
- A sociologist at Australia’s La Trobe University has begun a study of same-sex parents who have children together and later break up. (Note that the long-running National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study in the U.S. has also published work on lesbian parental breakups (PDF).)
- Here’s a story about a gay child rather than a gay parent—but it’s a wonderful tale that should be read by all: “When Your 7-Year-Old Son Announces, ‘I’m Gay.’“
- Finally, this item, which is related to parenting only because my whole family loved the charming 1995 children’s movie Babe, about a pig who wants to be a sheepdog. Australian actor and comedian Magda Szubanski, who plays Mrs. Hoggett in the film, has just come out publicly as gay, although she says her sexuality was never a secret to family, friends, and colleagues.
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